As more people begin to use digital cameras, digital video cameras, electronic music players, or other type of electronic devices, information appliances, and the like they are generating larger and larger amounts of digital data and other content. This data and content may usually include content that is associated with irreplaceable memories such as digital photographs and videos, in addition to music that has been purchased through on-line music stores or other providers. The value associated with this content may be sentimental and emotional especially for content that is irreplaceable if lost or would represent a significant financial loss to replace such as for music, video, or other multi-media content in the event it were lost and needed to be replaced.
It may also be appreciated that as these cameras, music players or other devices and information appliances proliferate and are provided with simple intuitive interfaces, they may be used with increasing frequency by users without sophisticated computer skills, and/or by users who may not appreciate the potential for loss of the data or content that may be inherent in either single device or single physical or geographical location storage. Many users, and perhaps the vast majority of users, never transfer any of their digital content to a physical representation (e.g. photo prints), and never back-up their data or content to a truly safe environment, or in any kind of a redundant manner that may guarantee with absolute or high probability, an ability to recover the data or content should a data loss occur. As a higher percentage of this content or other digital asset is only stored in the digital world, loss of this content or these assets due to local computer hard disk failure, computer virus or other malicious code or hacker attack, physical computer or information appliance theft, or fire, water or other natural disaster becomes a truly catastrophic event.
As more and more users find that they or others have lost personal documents either in the form of digital content or even in the form of traditional film or paper photographs, videos, and other personal or family documents, more and more people are looking for solutions to back-up and prevent the loss of their own photos, videos, music and other content. People are frequently reminded of their own potential vulnerability to loss when they watch broadcast news, browse the Internet, read books or periodicals, or otherwise become aware of home fires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, home invasions, or just general thefts and break-ins, the result of which is the loss of digital content or assets as well as of non-digital assets that might have been converted to a digital form through a scanning or other paper or printed media to digital conversion process. Therefore while the problem with conventional storage and backup may be seen to apply primarily to content or other assets that exist in digital form, it may be appreciated that a needed solution extends to content that may be placed into digital form so that it may be stored in a manner that reduces the likelihood of loss.
Conventional existing digital content back-up solutions are less user friendly and frequently require users to have some computer technical knowledge and often to have a strong technical knowledge and ability in order to effectuate even a local backup of the digital content or asset by such means as copying or writing (e.g., burning) the content to an optical media such as to a CD or DVD, copying the content or asset a directly attached local storage such as for example to an external Universal Serial Bus (USB) hard disk drive, or copying the content or asset between multiple personal computers (PCs). These conventional attempted solutions also frequently require that a person purchase and then attach some form of external storage device beyond that which was supplied with the computer (if any), and then when their content is backed-up, that they find some place to safely store their backed-up content, and maintain it in a manner that does not subject it to damage or being overwritten
Even when a person has purchased appropriate storage devices, and where required, a software solution to aid with performing the backup, the requirement to setup external storage devices is a significant deterrent to performing the backup for the typical user. Additionally, the physical storage solution that a user chooses is often not adequate to protect against common losses. For example, theft, fire, water damage will often target or affect all the computer and entertainment equipment in the consumer's home, which will likely include the backed-up device and potentially the backup media if separated from the backup device. Viruses may also be present for long periods of time on the user's machine before detection and can infect the backup material and files as well as the original machine. Therefore, even when a person has been diligent about backing up the digital content or asset, it may still be subject to partial or complete loss using conventional practices, systems, and methodologies.
In a partial but largely unsuccessful attempt to solve at least some problems associated with digital content, a limited number of online backup techniques have emerged in an attempt to solve some of the problems associated with the existing in-home or consumer back-up solutions. Some of these solutions attempt to provide storage outside the home to alleviate the concerns of fire or water damage and theft, but they often require the user to actively manage their content backup process. For example, the user may usually still need to interact with the online storage site to actively copy the digital content to be backed-up, again requiring some degree of technical understanding that may lie outside of a non-technical consumer's expertise.
The operating or business model of these backup services and sites are based on the idea that consumers receive a limited amount of storage (typically between about 3-5 GB) space for free storage and then need to pay a monthly (or other periodic) fee as their consumed storage goes up beyond the free allocation. Since digital still cameras and digital video cameras are producing higher resolution content, up to perhaps 8 mega pixels per still image from 3 mega pixels per still image only a few years ago, increasingly the user may quickly exceeds the free storage space allocation, and be subject to monthly excess storage fees.
Relatively new solutions from computer hardware and software providers, manufacturers, and/or vendors (such as for example from Apple Computer, Microsoft, and independent PC manufactures) are looking to solve the problems of requiring users to manage their backup process. The providers, manufacturers, and/or vendors provide solutions that act at least somewhat autonomously by automatically backing-up content on the personal computer (PC) or other information appliance as the user uses their computer. However, these backup process may appear to be automated and may seem to an ordinary consumer to provide all of the data protection that is needed, all of these proposed solutions use the same storage device (such as the single hard disc drive) that is being used for storing the original content. While this provides a solution that enables local retrieval of accidentally erased content, it does not protect against any other type of disaster or loss, including for example, losses that are do to hard disk drive hardware or controller failures, theft, fire or water damage, virus or malicious code attack, or a plethora of other computer problems or failure modes.
There have been some attempts to use information dispersal as an aid to achieve some measure of security or fault tolerance. One example of a conventional information dispersal approach and algorithm is suggested in the paper by Michael O. Rabin, entitled “Efficient Dispersal of Information of Security, Load Balancing, and Fault Tolerance” (Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, Vol. 36, No. 2, April 1989, pp. 335-348.), which is incorporated by reference herein and hereinafter referred to as Rabin or the Rabin paper or reference. However, this approach alone does not take into account the needs of a consumer directed backup system where some nodes may be determined to be unreliable and the benefits and needs for dynamic redispersal of information over time. It also does not take into account different redundancy requirements that may exist in a consumer oriented managed peer to peer backup service.
Another attempt to implement a file sharing system using a peer-to-peer (P2P) approach is described in a paper by Andrew Tytula as part of the requirements for a Carleton University 95.495 Honors Project and under the supervision of Professor Tony White is entitled “Peer-to-Peer File Sharing System using an Information Dispersal Algorithm”.
A further description of some aspects of distributed backup are described in a set of notes available on the web entitled “Distributed Backup through Information Dispersal” by Giampaolo Bella (giamp@dmi.unict.it), Costantino Pistagna (pistagna@dmi.unict.it), and Salvatore Riccobene (sriccobene@dmi.unict.it) all associated with the Università Degli Studi di Catania.
Unfortunately, none of these attempted distributed storage solutions provide the features and capabilities needed for a consumer storage device based free to the user on-line backup storage with retrieval and recovery features.
There remains therefore a need for a system, system architecture, and method that overcomes these problems and limitations of conventional systems and methods.